Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

September 29, 2009

I don't know if you're like me, but for some reason I always find it a pain to track down and keep links to my favourite videos. Yes, I add them to my bookmarks, link to them from Netvibes, but there's always something a bit missing. Well today I discovered Vodpod and set up Phil Bradley on Vodpod which is a collection of all the videos that interest me and that I use on courses. (Well, not all, but I'm getting there.) Really simple - set up a free account, add a browser bookmarklet and when you see a video that you like, click on the bookmark and add it to your collection. Add in tags and your own summary to taste and you're done.

The interesting thing is that this collection runs from a Vodpod URL, and doesn't take you back to the original site, such as YouTube. I'm wondering if this is going to be a way for school librarians and teachers to provide access to these useful resources if YouTube is blocked - anyone who has a chance to try this out - please let me know.

You can also add in publication widgets to post to your blog, twitter, facebook and so on for instant updating. Nice, simple and straightfoward - I like it!

CILIP | Twitter for Librarians. You may possibly remember that back in the early part of the summer there was a discussion on Twitter around the fact that I was going to be running a course for CILIP on the use of Twitter for librarians. As that course has now taken place I'm just scribbling down my thoughts on it, as promised at the time.

The course was a half day course, with a maximum of 10 people on each (one per computer). Most of the people who came on the course had not set up an account, though a few had, but these had lain dormant. The delegates (we had full numbers for both courses) had a variety of reasons for attending - the practicalities, how to use the system to promote their library/organisation/themselves, curiosity, incorporating Twitter into other resources such as their websites and the usual catch all of 'everything'. Many of the delegates also said that while they could have set up something for themselves they were hoping that a quick half day introduction would let them hit the ground running, get the 'how to' out of the way quickly and ensure they could get into the more interesting elements of the service.

One thing that particularly struck me about both courses was that people had a very specific idea about what they thought Twitter was - and for most of them it was as a communication medium. There was much interest shown in the search options provided by Twitter itself, but also in the third party search resources that allowed for easy biography searching, creation of lists and so on. The trending topics element of Twitter was a bit of a disaster on the day since fully half of them were related to what you should say before/during/after sex, but this in turn led to interesting discussions on how appropriate the use of the service would be in certain types of organisation.

In my opinion as the trainer the courses worked well. Everyone was able to create accounts, follow people, post tweets and get the basics. They all had a chance to search and use Twitter as a real time news medium (for several people this was an unexpected top use), and one or two also linked their account to their website during the day. Two things were lacking - more time, and the ability to have a person in front of them who could provide a case study of how they/their library used Twitter.

A course isn't for everyone. Some people do prefer to spend time picking things up themselves, playing around, trial by error, or by reading about the subject. Others like to have illustrations, demonstrations and a guiding hand. We're not all the same when it comes to teaching/learning but given that all the delegates enjoyed the session and everyone went away happy and confident about using the service I think the course was justified.

September 25, 2009

"Everyone has different reading abilities. Some people searching the web
are university professors and others are 5 year old children. Twurdy
has been created to provide people with access to search results that
suit their own readability level.

Twurdy uses text analysis software to "read" each page before it is
displayed in the results. Then Twurdy gives each page a readability
level. Twurdy then shows the readability level of the page along with a
color coded system to help users determine how easy the page will to
understand.

Twurdy's goal is to provide web searchers with information that is most
appropriate for them. This will mean that 10 year olds doing school
assignments don't have to click through difficult material to find
something they can use. It will also mean that phd students do not have
to click through websites designed for kids in order to find what they
are looking for."

OK, that's their blurb. To be fair, it's pretty accurate as well - a search leads to a summary of results, with a background colour of light orange through to very light orange - the darker the shade, the more difficult the page is to read, or rather - the more the page will appeal to an older or more experienced reading group. I found it very difficult to match the particular shade to the reading key, because the differences are very subtle. I'd have preferred more distinct colours, or to have a page of results ranked from easy to read to harder to read. I tended to use the 'Readability level' instead, which I found much more useful. It also doesn't help that the reading key scrolls off the screen as well, which I think is a basic design error.

To give you an indication of 'readability levels' the BBC Homepage has a readability level of 539. The News Front Page however has a level of 633, and the CBeebies stories and rhymes is 512. Slightly odd, and while I couldn't see any information on exactly how they arrive at these figures I did find this in the FAQ - "The structure and nature of some pages will mean that Twurdy's
readability level calculation is less useful than in many other pages."

Nice idea, and useful for teachers, school librarians and parents perhaps, but I'd be happier once it's got some more fine tuning under its belt.

September 23, 2009

YOHOGO! - Multi Search Engine. Well, it's a multi search engine, and you know what these are like, right? This one has tabs for the web, jobs, news, images, videos, music, torrents, social, reference and er.. adult videos. It's got a reasonable number of options available - 15 different engines in the web category, and the same number in images. Interesting it's providing access to Exalead images, but not web results.

My main gripe is that they pop results into their own frame, and overlay it with adverts. As a result I get to see only the top three results from Google for example, and have to start scrolling to see the rest. This is not good, and for that reason 'I'm out' as they say on Dragon's Den.

September 21, 2009

The strangely named search engine Duck Duck Go has added a 'quick peek' feature. It addresses the problem of having to hunt through a page to find the reference to the thing you're searching for. To access, just hover over the magnifying glasses next to results. In
real time, they:

1) Go out and grab the current version of the page.

2) Turn it into paragraphs of text.

3) Look for the most relevant paragraphs given the search terms.

4) Highlight those paragraphs in the preview window.

It's an early release and currently works best for informational
queries and on informational sites, e.g. Wikipedia, review sites, news
sites, blogs, etc.

Had a chance to play with Struly (as in 'yours truly) today. This is what they say about themselves:

"STRULY (rhymes ‘yours truly’) is a search engine. A multi-search engine to be precise.

But why would you want to use a new search engine? Well, Struly isn’t
anything new. And most of all Struly isn’t an attempt to wean you away
from your favorite search engine.

For the same effort/time it takes you to search Google or Yahoo, Struly
throws up results from both these as well as other search engines…and
in the process shows you some exciting developments in the search
industry."

It worked well; I was impressed with the speed. It's basically a tabbed engine, so if you search the web you get Google results displayed for you, with tabs to move to Yahoo, Bing, Carrot2, Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr. There are also search options for Images, Videos, News, and Torrents. If you're looking for a 'quick flip' set of results, this isn't at all bad!

September 18, 2009

Timeline of Search Engine History. Nice little visual history of the development of internet search engines, which hits the major highlights. May be useful if you're running an introduction to the internet.

Google - Internet Stats. Do NOT get excited. I did, and now I'm disappointed. The strap line is 'Welcome to our collection of the latest internet stats'. Sounds excellent, doesn't it. So I bundled in and did a search for internet growth uk. Reasonable request I thought, but apparently not, as there were no results at all. What - nothing? Nope, nothing. Nil. Zip. Nada. On yer bike pal.

How about 'internet growth' then? The little symbol started to whir. It continued to whir. It carried on whirring in the background while I went off to Twitter, and you know how long you can spend there. Finally I remembered what I was supposed to be doing. Still whirring. Eventually it stopped. Hurrah! "24% of mobile phone users in the UK have watched mobile TV and/or video." What use is that to me?

The sorry tale continued. This is basically a collection of statistics that Google has found from various resources which it doesn't link to, so it's not easy to check the original source. The most recent statistic that I found was dated April 2009. No, not a specific date, just a month.

Locking Google SafeSearch.This is not an option that's available yet; it's something Google is considering, so don't get excited or hunt for the option yet. "To lock SafeSearch settings, you'll need to log in using a Google
account and select the locking option from the preferences page. "Use
this page to lock the SafeSearch settings selected. The lock takes
effect when you sign out. when locked, SafeSearch displays a
distinctive image as the background of the search results pages,"
explains Google."

September 17, 2009

I've been playing around with the Exalead Exalabs site for a while, and thought I'd share my discoveries. In common with the Google labs site Exalead has been playing around with, and exploring a variety of different search concepts, and their experiments are available for the rest of us to play with.

The first of these is the 'Constellations' option; the link takes you to an English language search page for 'library'. We're shown something very similar to the screenshot below:

It's quite similar to the Kartoo interface that I looked at the other day; mouse over a result and see more detail about the page. Unfortunately however, that's primarily what this resource does - it'll identify a particular site/page, but it doesn't show any kind of context, so it's necessary to click on the link. Obviously Google and Bing in particular are rather more helpful than this. There's an option to refine the results, so my library search resulted in refinements such as public, digital or academic libraries. I could also choose to limit/change the search to 'people', but I was somewhat surprised to see results for 'Jesus' so I think a bit more work needs to be done there. There are options to move around the screen, enlarge/decrease the view and a sidebar to pull out a text version. Interestingly it simply wouldn't work for me in IE8, but what fine in Firefox. In summary - an interesting experiment, and probably wise to keep it in a 'laboratory' at the moment. Finally, they have a twitter account for the developers.

The second experiment is Miiget which is a celebrity search option. Search for a star, and have them displayed at the centre of a cloud of results - I tried Clint Eastwood and the entry was surrounding by other actors, directors and characters. Slightly disappointed that there wasn't an image of Eastwood - that can't be difficult to find, surely?

A fun option is the 'relation' between famous people, though I've got to say it was thin at times. I tried a link between Eastwood and Mother Teresa. It went like this: Eastwood to Harry S Truman (President Truman is featured in the 2006 Clint Eastwood movie Flags of Our
Fathers, where he is played by American actor David Patrick Kelly.) to John F Kennedy (He was a congressman for six years but had a mixed voting record, often
diverging from President Harry S. Truman and the rest of the Democratic Party.) to Mother Teresa (Kennedy came in third (behind Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mother Teresa) in a
Gallup list of the most admired people of the twentieth century.). Yes. well.

Chromatik is an image/colour search engine. Start with a search, choose saturation (colorful or grey), then luminosity (bright or dark) and hue. Finally an answer to the question - it was a red book! This one isn't at all bad, and stacks up well against the Google and Bing offerings.

Karen's done a more indepth view of this and other image/colour search tools in her blog which you might want to take a look at.

There's also an 'Exalead Lite' version, which looks similar to the normal version, but doesn't have any advanced search option, and the refine feature is rather more limited.

Then there's Tweepz which I liked. Basically it's another people finder - listing biography, avatar, URL, followers/following, with a really nice refine feature that I've not seen before, allowing you to limit to number of followers/following, language and 'extracted entities' which are search dependent. Useful options if you want to find some authoritative individuals to follow in a particular subject area for example.

Next up is Voxalead, which finds keywords in transcriptions of video. I have to say that I was very impressed with this resource - it does exactly what you'd imagine. Run your search and the video clips appear on the screen, choose the one that you're interested in and the video starts a few moments before your word(s) appear to put it into some sort of context.

The range of sources is disappointingly small at the moment - mainly major US and French resources, but given that this is just in the labs, that's fair enough.

The final option was something called Wikifier which I wasn't impressed with. The idea is that you type in a URL and Wikifier loads the page and puts in links to appropriate Wikipedia entries, and highlights them for you. However, a political reference to US lead to a link to the US Womens football team, and a football reference to Newcastle led to an entry on the city. This needs lots of work!

So there you have it - a quick roundup of the Exalead lab experiments, ranging from the really interesting and useful to the not so much. Do have an explore if you get the chance!